Franklin Taggart's Blog

Anyone who's followed me for a long time knows I teach people how to market their business by delivering valuable and memorable experiences. Last week, I welcomed Cat Stancik back to Your Own Best Company for a discussion of something she's been developing called Fireworks Experiences. After our interview, I attended her Fireworks Experience Workshop. This two-hour crash course will help you identify the kind of Firework Experience that fits your strengths and your client's focus. In one part of the workshop, Cat helped me clarify a new front-end marketing strategy I've been working on that made my idea many times better than it had originally been. I've already seen some exciting results. Here are some of our talking points: ** What is a Fireworks Experience? ** How Fireworks Experiences make better buyers. ** How Cat creates safe spaces where sales can happen more easily. ** Five types of buyers. ** Gaining the confidence to go off-script. We also shared our mutua

A morning phone call scuttles all but one of my plans today. I had a good time this morning on the Are You Waiting for Permission Pod-a-Thon with Meridith Grundei and Joseph Bennett. They made it the full twelve hours. It's the longest podcast episode I've ever been a part of, but I on;y had to show up for a small part of it. While I was on the podcast, my wife got a call about a family emergency that required an unanticipated trip to the Denver airport and back for me. My plans to finish editing and release the latest Your Own Best Company episode with Cat Stancik are going to wait another day. You will definitely want to hear that one. On my way back from the airport, I listened to three of my favorite podcasters. I thought I'd share my recommendation with you here. She Built This with Emily Aborn is a great show featuring interviews with women who have successfully built businesses and career paths they are loving. Emily is a wonderful interviewer, and her guests are top

The team is back together for a deep dive into the topic of deep work. The trigger for this conversation is this article Audrey found citing a study that suggested quiet quitting is directly related to the difficulty people have getting their work done. https://www.fastcompany.com/90801721/this-one-overlooked-factor-is-contributing-more-to-burnout-than-any-other This special Thanksgiving Day edition of Your Own Best Company brings Audrey Holst and Erica Holthausen back together around the virtual roundtable to explore our insights, understanding, and experience of the practice of deep work. Here are some of our stopping points: ** Finding your deep work rhythm. ** Booking time with yourself. ** Learning your own work patterns. ** The necessity of deep rest for the purpose of deep work. ** Making space for car problems and hurricanes. and more! Want to find Erica? https://catchlinecommunications.com Audrey? https://fortitudeandflow.com And we're all on LinkedIn, too. Happy Thanksgiv

Black Friday is one of the worst ideas ever to flow from the mind of humanity. Fill large buildings to capacity with humans who are experiencing various levels of FOMO, scarcity, the urgency of impending holidays, etc. Then offer extreme deals on limited supplies and watch them fight about it. And if you really want to make it happen, start a day early on a holiday that everyone used to take off to be with family or volunteer at the mission. This just doesn't seem like a good idea. And yet, Americans have begun to treat it with more reverence and anticipation than Christmas and Easter and all the lesser holy days. Black Friday has become, for me, a good excuse to stay home and do fun things. Write songs, watch movies with the family, and purposely avoid spending any money anywhere. This year will be different. My friends Joseph Bennett and Meridith Grundei are offering a more colorful Friday experience with their first-ever Pod-a-Thon. From 10 AM-10 PM EST on Friday, Meridith and J

I can tell when I'm in a self-protecting frame of mind when my first reaction to ideas and opportunities is the list of reasons why I can't. I'm too old, it's too expensive, I can't afford it, it'll never work, etc. ad nauseum. I'm not one of the people who suggest that ego is a bad thing. It's just a self-preservation mechanism that we all have. Its size is commensurate to the wounding it's trying to heal or prevent. Not bad. But we're creatures designed for growth and expansion, so there's a natural tension between the life force urging us into a greater expression of ourselves and the coping mechanism that's developed to keep us from harm and total abandonment. This tension has to be resolved in times when we're considering bigger options for ourselves than we've allowed ourselves to have before. I've said before I'm a fan of lists. To people who have an automatic impulse to find reasons why they can't I prescribe m

I know many people who have experienced significant losses this year. Jobs ending, loved ones dying, moving to new locations, leaving old situations behind. Sometimes when we are going through the grieving process, it's hard to access a sense of gratitude. In one conversation this morning, I was reminded of an observation I've made in my own experiences of grief that gratitude may be one of the stages of grieving we need to consider.  In her groundbreaking research, Dr. Kubler Ross identified several emotional stages of grief - shock, denial, anger, bargaining, and acceptance- and saw that these emotional adjustments are common to humans adapting to change. In her case, she was studying grief associated with death, but we've come to understand that grieving occurs with most transitional experiences. If you're struggling to access your own sense of gratitude, try taking some time to reflect on what you miss about the person, place, or thing now gone. Such reflection may

Do you want your plan to determine your lifestyle or your lifestyle to determine your plan? Much of my work is focused on strategy and planning for career direction, business and marketing decisions, and some other transitional times. People often want to dive into the safety and structure that planning provides before they can answer a more basic question. How do you want to spend your time? Michael Hyatt has a great template to help people imagine their perfect week. I like to start with a starter timeframe of a day. What does your best day look like? As people work out these details, we're given a context and framework within which their best plans can take shape. Often, if people jump into the planning before considering their lifestyle desires, they set themselves up for a more challenging experience with a higher likelihood of failure. I've found that imagining how you want your days to unfold is an exercise that skips the challenge and failure. Since this is the end of t